Living things have no inertia, and tend to no equilibrium.

Oh devil! truth is better than much profit. I have searched over the grounds of my belief, and if wife and child and name and fame were all to be lost to me one after the other as the penalty, still I will not lie.

I have always been, am, and propose to remain a mere scholar. All that I have ever proposed to myself is to say, this and this I have learned; thus and thus have I learned it; go thou and learn better; but do not thrust on my shoulders the responsibility for your own laziness if you elect to take, on my authority, conclusions the value of which you ought to have tested for yourself.

Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom-box.

Matter and force are the two names of the one artist who fashions the living as well as the lifeless.

Of the few innocent pleasures left to men past middle life, the jamming of common sense down the throats of fools is perhaps the keenest.

It is not who is right, but what is right, that is of importance.